Privilege brings Home Affairs bureaucrats unstuck

In yet another bungle, the Home Affairs portfolio has been savaged by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security for trying to suggest a radical change in Australia's stance on citizenship.

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The Home Affairs department has added to its lengthy list of debacles with a train wreck appearance before the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) on the government’s citizenship-stripping laws that appeared to signal a dramatic change in the way the government views citizenship.

Appearing before the PJCIS on Friday afternoon, officials from the Home Affairs portfolio — the centre of a number of major bungles in recent years and currently the subject of significant national security concerns over its links with gambling giant Crown — inflicted significant damage on the government’s case for ever-greater powers to strip Australians of citizenship. It was during 2015 hearings into the citizenship-stripping legislation, then in its draft form, that officials of the then-immigration portfolio admitted to major failings around the bill, prepared by the Abbott government to demonstrate its national security credentials.

Friday’s hearing, part of a scheduled review of the laws, went even worse, with officials being forced to admit the power to prevent people returning to Australia did not stop terrorists, and that they didn’t even know how many people were affected by the laws. They also failed to explain why the power to strip dual citizens of Australian citizenship was needed given the government had since given itself the power to exclude people from returning to Australia, and whether Australians were safer with Australian terrorists at liberty overseas or in jail here.

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But Home Affairs assistant secretary Derek Bopping alarmed the committee when he flagged that Home Affairs now regards Australian citizenship for all citizens, regardless of place of birth, as a “privilege”, suggesting it could be withdrawn by the government at any time. “Australian citizenship is a privilege,” Bopping told the committee in his prepared opening statement:

With that privilege comes responsibilities, including to obey the law and uphold Australian values … Conduct such as acts in preparation for a terrorist act, or intentionally associating with a terrorist organisation, is contrary to Australia’s democratic values and beliefs. It is a repudiation of a person’s allegiance to Australia, and it would be contrary to the public interest for such a person to remain an Australian citizen.

The claim that citizenship is a privilege, rather than a right, represents an alarming change in language from a portfolio that has seen a dramatic shift toward national security over immigration since 2015. Liberal MP Tim Wilson seized on Bopping’s change of language: “Is that the position of the Department of Home Affairs — that it’s a privilege rather than people who are born in this country have a right to be Australian citizens?”

Bopping tried to row back, saying he meant “a small-p privilege, I think most Australians would regard citizenship as a privilege”. Labor’s Mark Dreyfus joined in. “Is that a serious submission that you’re making to this committee — that Australians, to pick up Mr Wilson’s point, don’t see their citizenship as a right but as a privilege? Are you serious, Dr Bopping?” he said.

Wilson went further. “I find that, frankly, incredibly disturbing to hear … the idea that Australian citizens don’t have a natural right to their citizenship … if the department is now taking the view that Australian citizenship is a privilege, it says something, frankly, quite concerning about how the department sees this legislation and its purpose. Can I just get clarity: is the position of the Department of Home Affairs to think that Australian citizenship is a privilege?”

Bopping floundered. He was using “privilege”, he said, “in the sense that the common person would use ‘it’s a privilege to be Australian'”.

Labor’s Kristina Keneally also wanted to know if it was only people like her who had acquired Australian citizenship, rather than obtaining it through birth, for whom it was a “privilege”. Bopping was by now rowing back at motorboat speed: “I don’t think that my opening statement portrays that dual citizenship is less than anything at all.”

A sign that the government wants to withdraw the right to citizenship from Australians? Or a smart-arse bureaucrat who thought it’d be cute to echo the government’s rhetoric on immigration, and got caught out? Either way, it seems the PJCIS hasn’t let Peter Dutton’s partisan abuse of it get in the way of grilling bureaucrats.

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19 thoughts on “Privilege brings Home Affairs bureaucrats unstuck”

AuFozzy

A thought experiment. We will reach a demographic tipping point where the population will demand parliament to regard not reducing CO2 emissions as an act of terrorism.
At that point all coal mining and impeding carbon reduction is regarding as a terrorism offense (as it should already be).
Then every right wing conservative, who’s ratcheted up national Security penalties, will be caught in them. I look forward to Canovan, Morrison, and Taylor all being arrested and stripped of their Citizenship for terrorism related offenses.

Vasco

Peter Schulz

Yes, I was having similar fantasies when reading this article. We could include all those politicians and bureaucrats who have brought in laws and processes that are ‘contrary to Australia’s democratic values and beliefs’ in areas such as surveillance, draconian anti-terror laws, Centrelink robo-debt scams, and other areas that reverse the onus of proof away from innocent-until-proven-guilty. And of course, traitors like Howard and Downer who sold our national interest down the drain and increased our terrorism risk with their illegal and counter-productive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Richard Shortt

Irrespective of the true depth (or wisdom) of this submission, the approach taken in the on-going national security debate has divided Australians into classes. There are the privileged class (small p or large, you decide) who are born in Australia, there are the less-privileged class who are granted (revocable) citizenship and, as previously, there are the ‘others’. The others include of course those on visas of various kinds who should be better known by the class label of ‘guest workers’. The great egalitarian, Southern Land is no more.

Ill fares the land

Seriously? Surely, if Derek Bopping wasn’t a real person, Shaun Michalleff would already have used that as one of his silly made up names on Mad as Hell. Are you sure that it wasn’t a Mad as Hell actor in costume?

This reeks of the putrid moral superiority of conservatives who have been desperately trying to establish a wall around conservative voters by painting them as the select group of Australians (i.e., those who support the Coalition), who are the PM’s “us”, as distinct from the “them” who are those who don’t adopt or live by the PM’s perverted tribal code. The “them” includes Labor and the Greens and all who vote for those parties and who allegedly see the boundaries around who should be allowed to be Australian with evil fluidity – not like the LNP and its flunkies in Home Affairs who are protecting the “us” from the “them”.

It is the PM’s tribalism writ large and we should be afraid and angered in equal measure because neither Labor nor the Greens presently seem to have a strategy to pushback against this divisive claptrap.

klewso

Friday afternoon? Sure?
Why wouldn’t coverage of this tangible indication – of this “How good is Australia” government’s actual regard for us plebs – have bobbed up elsewhere in our “news media” over the week-end?
Not even on Insiders :- Crabb and Smethurst too busy trying to mitigate Coalition cock-up embarrassments by spreading it to Labor (“Albanese + Labor/2 = blame for Robodebt” ∵ it was a Labor initiative : handing Robodebt to Crabb’s pet Coalition 6 years ago to do with what they are now???)?
* Our “right to know”?
* “Freedom of the press”?
* The way we’re supposed to care about the threats that media is facing from this totalitarian-government-in-waiting?
* Their overwhelming regard for us plebs? ……. Oh wait a minute.
On second thoughts, disregard the above?

R. Ambrose Raven

No, it doesn’t really represent a change at all, nor has said Bopping any reason to change now. Here we see the Salami Principle in action – he has put forward an idea that has been only politely rejected; he has suffered no personal sanction of any kind, nor has his Department.

Having fudged the boundaries, they can now advance the idea further, cherry-picking recent incidents as they come to hand, greatly assisted by morrison and his Misgovernment’s open contempt for ordinary people.

Here too we see the Liberal Party and internal repression agencies working to overcome the ignominy of their brown-uniformed paramilitary enforcers being humiliated while attempting to interrogate citizens wholesale on the streets of Melbourne on the 28th of August ’15. On that day our heroes were the protesters of the Socialist Alliance, the much-Right-reviled descendants of the Maoists, Trotskyites and Anand Marg.

It was only after Socialist Alliance’s successful protest that Labor’s class traitors – Dreyfus and Shorten included – reversed their support for mass daylight detention and interrogation of ordinary citizens going about their business!